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A BOY'S RELIGION 

FROM MEMORY 



BY 

RUFUS M. JONES 



lifjtlatitlpfjta : 

FERRIS & LEACH 

29 North Seventh Street 

1902 






THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copits Received 

DEC. 23 1902 

Copyright wnrr 

CLASS ^XXc. No. 

COPY B. 



COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY FERRIS & LEACH. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 



page 



I. The Dawn of Memory . . . 19 

II. One of the Chosen ... 31 

III. The Search of the Scriptures . 41 

IV. Visiting Friends .... 56 
V. The High Seats .... 71 

VI. The Sense of the Meeting . . S3 

VII. The Tree of Knowledge . . 97 

VIII. The Moment to Decide . . 107 

IX. The Faith and the Life . . 119 

X. The Great Mystery . . .131 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

/ 
Home Frontispiece, 



PAGE. 

V 

The Meeting House 72 

v/ 

The Author, in Boyhood ... 102 

s 
The School House 112 



Introduction. 



INTRODUCTION. 

It is not a pleasant task to write or 
speak in the first person, and the privi- 
lege of writing autobiography is prop- 
erly reserved to old age. The pages 
which make up this modest little book 
have been written with no thought of 
throwing light upon the personality of 
the writer, and the simple story is told 
here for a totally different end than to 
awaken an interest in his own some- 
what uneventful boyhood. The pur- 
pose^ in short, is to tell what a boy's re 
ligion is like — to show it growing and 
developing. We have books enough 
which attempt the difficult task of con 



10 Introduction. 

ceiving the religion of primitive man. 
We are beginning, too, to get some lit- 
erature on the child's religion, though 
at the present time the amount is mea- 
ger and the positive results of the study 
of the child rather scanty. It may be 
worth while for a man, who is still in 
sight of his childhood, to try to tell how 
it felt to be a boy, and particularly to 
endeavor to bring back the deeper side 
of those days when the soul was not too 
scarred and callous to feel the spiritual 
world which impinges on the one we 
see with our eyes. 

The difficulty, of course, is to draw 
the true line here between memory and 
imagination. If one could really suc- 
ceed in producing the inner side of his 
boyhood, the contribution would be ex- 



Introduction. 11 

tremely valuable. But the moment a 
mature person undertakes to give a 
memory of the religion of his boyhood 
he strains it through the entire after 
life and so colors it all with the tinge 
which later experience has added. 
Then, with the most honest of us, im- 
agination will cheat us into believing 
that we remember what we only fancy, 
or think we ought to have felt. This 
difficulty is verily insurmountable, and 
must frankly be confessed. The pres- 
ent writer has simply done his best to 
tell things as they were — though he 
makes no claim to infallibility — and he 
has stubbornly refused to beautify his 
picture with the aid of doubtful ma- 
terial, which was all the time more 
abundant than the genuine. 



12 Introduction, 

The real object for writing at all has 
been to impress the fact that a boy, 
caught wild in the country, with all the 
impulses of evil from within playing 
upon him, and manifold temptations 
crowding upon him from without, is 
yet more concerned over his spiritual 
condition than he is over anything else. 
In a word, the average boy is pro- 
foundly religious, as these pages will 
indicate. He may easily be turned 
against religion by unwise treatment, 
but if the atmosphere about him is 
right, he will come into a religious life 
as naturally as he comes into the other 
great inheritances of the race. 

These chapters, will, however, be in 
vain if they fail to indicate how diffi- 
cult is the task of discovering what goes 



Introduction. 13 

on within the boy, or if they fail to 
show what delicate treatment is re- 
quired to bring him through his bud- 
ding periods and his shifting ideals to 
a clear and well-defined life purpose. 
If boys are better than they seem to be, 
as this book maintains, they are also 
much more difficult to understand than 
is generally believed, and their lives 
are in more unstable equilibrium. The 
parents' responsibility is most assuredly 
a solemn one, for in the days of boy- 
hood the invisible structure of a self is 
silently being woven, and the social en- 
vironment is a tremendous factor in the 
final product. Here is the modest ef- 
fort to tell how one boy's life formed 
itself, and what the environment was. 
The secondary purpose of the writer 



14 Introduction. 

has been to preserve a little longer the 
memory of a form of religious life and 
of a set of customs which one must 
somewhat sadly confess are either pass- 
ing away or have already passed away. 
Quakerism is still a living force. It 
is a present faith, and it has a great 
potential future. But the Quakerism 
which was the atmosphere of this boy's 
life has in a large measure already 
ceased from the earth. It was a unique 
type of religious life, and it kept its 
peculiar form only so long as it existed 
apart from the currents of the larger 
social whole. The movements of mod- 
ern complex life have forced it either 
to die out or undergo transformation. 
It was a beautiful faith, and it pro- 
duced rare types of personal sainthood 



Introduction. 15 

whose story is not yet written. In this 
simple way some impressions . of this 
spiritual atmosphere, with its local 
color, are caught and preserved. It is 
only a thumb nail sketch of a subject 
large enough for a worthier canvas. 
Haverford, Pa., 1902. ^ 



Wqz ©aton of Jftemorg. 



MAaiMtariia«Mi 



I. 

8Hje Baton of Jttemotg* 

It is always worth while to see how 
a boy thinks. The trouble is that very 
few boys let out their deepest thoughts 
and musings, and when they get old 
enough to tell their " long, long 
thoughts," they have become too old to 
remember them ! Their boyhood ideas 
get all mixed up and confused with the 
maturer thoughts and conceptions of 
the grown man, and the boy's inner 
world never gets quite revealed. I 
hope I have not yet " traveled so far 
inland " that I have entirely forgotten 
the heaven that lay " about me in my 
infancy," and I shall try to gather up 
some of the fragments of that happy 
period when my life was just beginning 
to feel the tides of the boundless sea, 



,mk u ^. fir 



20 • A Boy's ^Religion. 

breaking on the shores of its tiny 
island. 

We never remember anything about 
the most important years of our lives 
— those first three when we are really 
getting under way, when we learn to 
eat, and to see, to walk and to talk, 
when we discover that we are and that 
other people are, when we come upon 
the mighty fact that we have a will and 
that we must obey something not our- 
selves, but higher than we. Those 
three years will not come back. They 
are like the water which the mill has 
used, and which has gone on never to 
flow back upon itself. Others may tell 
us little snatches out of this lost strip 
of ourselves, and we may have heard 
things told until we half believe that 
we remember, but few of us are sound 
authorities on the wisdom of those sub- 
merged years. But this much I know. . 
I came into a world where love was 
waiting for me, and into a family in 



The Dawn of Memory. 21 

which religion was as important an ele- 
ment for life as was the air we 
breathed. 

There were, however, some features 
which would naturally discourage a 
newcomer. The house to which I came 
was most plainly furnished, it was a 
good many miles from any city, a cold 
bleak winter was at its height, and if I 
had seen the whole situation in these 
first hours I should certainly have be- 
gun life with " the blues." But those 
" creaturely " things troubled me not a 
bit. It never occurred to me that this 
was a world of inequalities, and I had 
no dream of the struggle by which one 
wins what he gets. The only real fact 
I can relate about these first hours is 
one which shows what the highest am- 
bition of the family was, and it will 
also illustrate a characteristic trait iu 
the person who did very much to shape 
my life in those years when I was plas- 
tic to the touch. As soon as I came 



22 A Boy's Religion. 

into the arms of my aunt, who was and 
is one of God's saints, she had an 
" opening/' such as have often come to 
her. " This child will one day bear the 
message of the Gospel to distant lands 
and to people across the sea." It was 
spoken solemnly and with a calm assur- 
ance as though she saw the little thing 
suddenly rising out of her lap to go. 
That prophecy may seem like a simple 
word, but it expressed the highest ideal 
of that heart, and it was never given 
up, even when the growing child 
showed signs of doing anything else 
rather than fulfilling the prediction. 
If the neighbors, in the period of 
stormy boyhood, had been told of the 
prophecy they would for once have lost 
their faith in the forevision of this 
woman whom they all loved and gen- 
erallv believed. 

As I have said, while I was too young 
to have any religion of my own, I had 
come to a home where religion kept its 



The Dawn of Memory. 23 

fires always burning. I was not " chris- 
tened " in a church, but I was sprinkled 
from morning till night with the dew of 
religion. We never ate a meal which 
did not begin with a hush of thanksgiv- 
ing; we never began a day without " a 
family gathering/' at which mother 
read a chapter of the Bible, and after 
a long silence some one would generally 
bow and talk with God so simply and 
quietly that He never seemed very far 
away. In fact, when I first began to 
think of God, I did not think of Him as 
very far off. At meeting some of the 
Friends shouted loud and strong when 
they called upon Him, but at home He 
always heard easily. 

The next story I remember out of 
this dim period of my youth shows how 
religion filtered into my play. Our 
house was one of the headquarters of 
traveling Friends, of whom I shall have 
more to say later, and my father used 
to drive through the community and 



24 A Boy's Religion. 

" appoint meetings " for them. I was 
always hearing about " 'pointed meet- 
ings/' whatever they might be. So 
when the little tots came to play with 
me, I worked out my budding Quaker- 
ism on them. I gathered them in a row 
on the floor and told them to sit still 
for we were going to have a 'pointed 
meeting. Then I stood up in front and 
pointed with great solemnity to each 
one of them. 

One of the very earliest memories out 
of this dim period is the return of my 
aunt — the one of the prophecy — from 
an extensive religious visit through 
Ohio and Iowa Yearly Meetings. I was 
most impressed, of course, with the 
things she brought me. They were as 
wonderful to me as the dusky-skinned 
natives, which Columbus carried back, 
were to the people who crowded about 
his returning ship. Iowa was farther off 
then than the Philippines are now. But 
the next impression was made by the 



The Dawn of Memory. 25 

marvelous stories of special providences 
and strange leadings which had been 
experienced in the journey. I listened 
as though one of the Argonauts were 
telling of their adventures in search of 
the golden fleece. Every place where 
there was a meeting house had its pecu- 
liar episode, which I had told over and 
over to me. This was the first thing 
which made me realize that the world 
was so big. Before that it seemed to 
me that it came to an end where the 
sky touched the hills. But now my 
aunt had been out beyond the place 
where the sky came down, and she had 
found the earth still going on out 
there ! But, after all, the most wonder- 
ful thing was the way in which God 
took care of her and told her what to do 
and to say in every place where she went. 
It seemed to be exactly like the things 
they read to me out of the life of Jo- 
seph and Moses and David, and I sup- 
posed that everybody who was good had 



26 A Boy's Religion. 

such things done for them. I made up 
my mind to be good and have things 
done for me ! 

But I got a sad awakening which dis- 
turbed me, and made me discover a fact 
which puzzles old heads sometimes — 
the fact that the righteous sometimes 
suffer. One night the Baptist church — 
the only church building in our little 
village — burned to the ground. The 
neighbors improvised an investigation 
committee, for they suspected it was 
set on fire, and they soon found that it 
was part of a deep-laid scheme of re- 
venge. In our village one man sold li- 
quor, though it was against the law of 
our State. He was a very hard and 
dangerous man to deal with. But a 
temperance meeting had been held in 
this church which stirred the commun- 
ity to action, and my father had much 
to do with bringing this liquor-seller to 
justice. He paid his fine and then went 
to work to punish those who disturbed 



The Dawn of Memory. 27 

him. He hired a poor man to burn the 
church, and he planned next to burn 
our house. It was a small matter, as 
the house did not get burned; but I was 
old enough to get a shock from the 
event. It seemed, then, that it was 
somewhat risky to be good ! You might 
get your house burned if you tried to 
make bad men stop being wicked. And 
yet God did after all take care of us and 
only a Baptist church got burned ! Out 
of it all I got some little glimpse into 
the nature of the world, and, though T 
could not yet solve the problem of evil, 
I began to think about it ! 



©ne of tftr €\)08tn. 



II. 

©ne at tfje GDfjoaen. 

I cannot remember when I did not 
think about God and wonder about 
Him. It was very hard, however, to 
make things go together in my thoughts 
about Him. I knew that He really 
lived in a beautiful city up above the 
blue dome of the sky, which always ap- 
peared to be exactly over the top of our 
house — the highest place in the sky was 
surely there. But, then, too, He was 
everywhere else. He made the flowers 
grow. He brought me a little brother 
when I was four years old. He was 
near enough to hear people talk to Him. 
He could see every bad thing I did. 
When we had " silence " after morn- 
ing " reading " I always thought He 
was somewhere near, telling mother or 



32 A Boy's Religion. 

my aunt what to pray for, and then 
hearing them when they spoke. They 
often asked Him to make me a good 
boy, and I believed that He was always 
looking after me. 

I was dreadfully afraid of the dark 
through my entire boyhood. I always 
thought that the dark was " inhabited." 
I did not feel quite sure whether the 
inhabitants were good or bad, whether 
they were kind or unfriendly. But I 
thought it best not to take any chances. 
There was a dark place in our cellar in- 
to which I never went. It was pitiably 
near the apple bin, and I had a feeling 
that " something " might come out 
upon me at any time. I had the same 
feeling about another place in an old 
attic, and I still dream about it. I 
never went down cellar without talking 
in a loud, strong voice, and I never 
came up without feeling that I had had 
an " escape." I used to look round 
from the top of the stairs to see if any 



One of the Chosen, 33 

" face " was looking up at me. Nobody 
ever told me that there were " beings " 
in the dark, but it was a deep-seated 
conviction. 

Now I thought God lived in the 
light, just as these " beings " lived in 
the dark. Good things always came in 
the daylight. I had to go to bed as soon 
as it grew dark, and I had a feeling that 
almost anything might happen before 
morning came. I always used to whis- 
per after I got in bed, " Oh, God, 
please do not let the house ^burn down 
to-night. Do not let anybody get me, 
and do not let any bad things happen." 
But I never felt as sure of the result 
as I did when I asked Him to do things 
for me in the daytime. All this time I 
found it difficult to understand how 
God could be up there in His beauti- 
ful city and still down here too, looking 
after so many things — taking care of a 
little boy like me. It seemed as though 
He must have a host of troubles. We 



34 A Boy's Religion. 

always told Him all about ours, and I 
supposed everybody else did the same, 
which I felt would make His days full 
of trying things. I thought, too, that 
He had to decide on the kind of punish- 
ment for every person who was bad. 
That seemed like a very heavy task— 
because mother had a good deal of trou- 
ble, doing it for three of us. It was 
thus a never-ending puzzle how He 
could be in so many places at once, and 
how He could be happy when He had 
so many hard things to do. 

I began to go to school when I was 
four years old. We had half a mile to 
walk, and so we took our dinner in a 
pail and ate it in the school house. I 
learned something in the school, but I 
learned a good deal more at noon and 
before school: only it was a very differ- 
ent kind of thing I learned outside ! 
This is not the place to describe a coun- 
try school as it used to be and probably 
still is. It is a wonder how any boy 



One of the Chosen. 35 

can come through such influences with- 
out being injured for life. The boys and 
girls I played with were probably just 
like others — but they knew a lot of 
things I never heard about at home ! I 
learned these lessons very fast, and by 
the time I could read I had the small 
country boy's stock of inf ormation, and 
I had a new side of life altogether. 

I said " thee " and " thy " to every- 
body, and I would fully as soon have 
used profane words as have said " you " 
or " yours " to any person. I thought 
only " Friends " went to heaven, and 
so I supposed that the use of " thee " 
and " thy " was one of the main things 
which determined whether one would 
be let in or not. Nobody ever told me 
anything like this, and if I had asked 
anybody at home about it, I should 
have had my views corrected. But for 
a number of years this was my settled 
faith. I pitied the poor neighbors who 
would never be let in, and I wondered 



36 A Boy's Religion. 

why everybody did not " join the meet- 
ing " and learn to say " thee " and 
" thy." I had one little Gentile friend 
whom I could not bear to have " lost/' 
and I went faithfully to work and 
taught him " the language/' which he 
always used with me until he was ten 
or twelve years old, when the strain of 
the world got too heavy upon the little 
fellow ! 

I am quite sure no Israelite in the 
days of Israel's prosperity ever had a 
more certain conviction that he be- 
longed to a peculiar people whom the 
Lord had chosen as His own than I did. 
There was for me an absolute break 
between " us " and anybody else. This 
phariseeism was never taught me or en- 
couraged directly by anybody, but I 
none the less had it. If I had anything 
in the world to glory over it was that I 
was a Quaker. Others about me had 
a good deal more that was tangible than 
I had. Their life was easier, and they 



One of the Chosen. 37 

did not have as hard a struggle to get 
things which they wanted as we did. 
But they were not " chosen " and we 
were ! As far back as I can travel in 
my memory I find this sense of superi- 
ority — a sort of birthright into divine 
grace and favor. I think it came partly 
from impressions I got from traveling 
Friends, whose visits had an indescrib- 
able influence upon me, as I shall show 
later. It will, of course, seem to have 
been a very narrow view, and so it was, 
but its influence was decidedly import- 
ant upon me. It gave somewhat of a 
dignity to my little life to feel that I 
belonged to God's people, that out of 
all the world we had been selected q to be 
His, and that His wonders had been 
worked for us, and that we were objects 
of His special love and care. 

Everybody at home, as well as many 
of our visitors, believed implicitly in 
immediate divine guidance. Those who 
went out from our meeting to do ex- 



38 A Boy's Religion. 

tended religious service — and there 
were many such visits undertaken — al- 
ways seemed as directly selected for 
these momentous missions as were the 
prophets of an earlier time. As far 
back as I can remember I can see 
Friends sitting talking with my grand- 
mother of some " concern " which was 
heavy upon them, and the whole matter 
seemed as important as though they had 
been called by an earthly king to carry 
on the affairs of an empire. It was 
partly these cases of divine selection 
and the constant impression that God 
was using these persons whom I knew 
to be His messengers that made me so 
sure of the fact that we were His cho- 
sen people. At any rate I grew up 
with this idea firmly fixed, and the 
events which will next be told deepened 
the feeling. 



GKje Seardj of tije Scriptures. 



III. 

Wqt Searcfj of t^e Scriptural 

I began to go to Bible School when 
I was six years old. It was a union 
school, held on the top floor of a store 
in a room which had been fitted up as a 
public hall. I was in a class of little 
boys, and we were taught by a Friend 
who knew more about farming than he 
did about boys, and who sometimes 
made us laugh with his funny way of 
talking; but he did us a real service, 
and I still remember some of the pas- 
sages in the Psalms which he had us 
learn " by heart. " Learning by heart 
had not then gone out of fashion, and 
in our neighborhood the idea was cher- 
ished that a well-stored memory might 
possibly some day prove useful. This 
was, it will be understood, before the 



42 A Boy's Religion. 

discovery of the method of entertaining 
children with pretty stories to make the 
hour interesting. We sat on a hard, 
straight bench, with our little feet 
some way from the floor, and said over 
and over our verses which we had 
learned during the week. " Whither 
shall I fly from Thy presence ? " was 
one of the passages; and then our 
teacher " moralized " to us until the 
hour was up. 

But my real acquaintance with the 
Bible was made at that best school — a 
mothers knee. The Bible was our one 
book at home, and we used it as the 
scholar uses his library. We literally 
fed ourselves on it. We began the day 
with reading it. We read out of it in 
the evening, and we read it on First- 
day as part of the business of the day. 
When I was eight years old I was set 
to read the Psalms through, with the 
promise of a new pair of mittens — as 
strangely colored as Joseph's coat — 



The Search of the Scriptures. 43 

when the task was done. I faithfully 
did it, and, what is more, it did me 
good. I really felt the power of this 
Hebrew poetry, and I soon got to know 
the Psalms so that at morning reading 
I used to call for my favorite ones when 
mother asked if any one had a " selec- 
tion." 

Two years later — when I was ten — - 
came one of the crises of my life. It 
was a great misfortune, which turned 
out to be a blessing, as is usually the 
case, if one has eyes to see it. I had 
a dreadful injury to my foot, which 
nearly cost me my leg and seriously 
threatened my life. Through all the 
pain and suffering I discovered what a 
mother's love was. I had been going to 
the bad all summer. I was finding out 
the endless resources for fun and mis- 
chief, which a country village, full of 
boys and girls, offers, and I had 
stretched the proverbial apron-string to 
the breaking point. I had got in the 



44 A Boy's Religion. 

way of doing things which I did not 
tell at home, and I often hurried away 
in the morning before I found what the 
work of the day would be, so that I 
might have the day on the lake with 
the boys. Temptations were as thick 
as bees on the clover, and I let them 
settle on me without scaring them off. 
When I came home at night I generally 
felt hopelessly bad, for I knew I had 
grieved everybody who loved me; but 
the next day I did the same thing over 
again, if I got a chance. This particu- 
lar misfortune came because I had gone 
to the lake early First-day morning for 
a swim, and so did not get back in time 
to go to meeting with the family. 

For nine months I never took a step, 
and for the first week of my suffering 
mother sat by me every night, and T 
felt her love sweep over me. As soon 
as I was through the racking pain, 
something had to be done to entertain 
me — to make the long hours pass, for 



The Search of the Scriptures. 45 

everybody in our household was occu- 
pied with their own tasks. Grand- 
mother, who was eighty-eight years old, 
had plenty of leisure, and so it was ar- 
ranged for us to entertain each other. 
I decided to read the Bible through out 
loud to her. She could knit mechan- 
ically with flying needles, giving no 
more attention to her fingers than she 
did to the movement of the hands on 
the clock. Her hands had learned how 
to knit until they did it themselves. 
Lying stretched out by her, I began at 
the great words, " In the beginning 
God created," and read on through the 
wonderful events. 

There were many passages which 
puzzled me and held me up, but be- 
tween us we generally thought our way 
through, and we fixed up an explana- 
tion which I dare say might not be 
found in the latest commentary; but 
perhaps it was as near right as some of 



46 A Boy J s Religion. 

the conclusions there given, for it came 
from the mouth of the little ones whose 
wisdom Christ commended. The real 
trial came when I got into a " begat " 
chapter, and had to read through gen- 
erations of men who had unpronounce- 
able names. Here grandmother sud- 
denly found that her knitting needed 
most of her attention, and I had to do 
the best I could with Chedorlaomer 
and other persons whose mothers, I 
thought, showed no taste in the choice 
of names. But I never skipped any- 
thing. I fully believed that one line 
was just as much inspired as another, 
and I always had fear of those plagues 
which were spoken of at the end upon 
those who put in or left out something. 
As soon, however, as we got to the 
main current, which begins with the 
call of Abraham, I was carried on by 
the force of the stream. This was the 
most interesting thing I had ever read, 
and I finished Joseph with tears run- 



The Search of the Scriptures. 47 

ning down my face. I shall never get 
over that impression. 

Boys nowadays read so many stories, 
and such highly-spiced ones, full of 
dramatic situations, that they do not 
perhaps feel the power of this wonder- 
ful picture of the patriarchal life. It is 
a sad loss to miss it. It more than made 
up for my lack of other books — and for 
me these characters were as real and 
vivid as the people moving in the next 
room. Every event of Jacob's and Jo- 
seph's careers was as clearly pictured as 
were the things my eyes had seen. 
Moses' life and deeds in Egypt, and the 
events of the exodus and wilderness 
journey were hardly less moving; but 
I found my passage often impeded in 
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. 
There was nothing in my world like it. 
I could not imagine the descriptions. 
I got dreadfully frightened over eating 
pork, because the swine did not chew 
the cud and so had " no standing under 



48 A Boy's Religion. 

the law." Not a person in our neigh- 
borhood could explain on what ground 
we boldly went on eating pork in flat 
contradiction of the Scriptures! This 
gave grandmother and me some very 
hard exegesis, and we never felt that 
we made a good case. 

As a boy I thought Judges a great 
book. I did not realize then, as I do 
now, what a crisis this period was in 
Israel's history, when " every man was 
doing what was right in his own eyes," 
but I was carried along with intense 
interest over the doings of Deborah, 
and Gideon, and Jephtha, and Samson. 
Here my imagination had no such diffi- 
culties as it had encountered over TJrim 
and Thummim, and the ark, which I 
never could quite reconstruct. But 
David was my hero. He was a man af- 
ter my own heart. I always had a thrill 
as Samuel passed all Jesse's sons with- 
out finding his king-boy, and finally dis- 
covered him off with the sheep, and 



The Search of the Scriptures. 49 

then came the description of the great 
battle with Goliath in the " Valley of 
Elah," which came to be the most fam- 
iliar scene to me of any recorded in the 
Old Testament. It was the glory of 
being God's champion which moved me 
so, and the fact that a boy from the 
sheepf old could deliver a nation kindled 
me. Wherever the narrative grew f 
vivid and great events were done I felt 
my pulses throb, and, on the other 
hand, I always suffered over Israel's de- 
feats and sins. 

Daniel and Esther were two of my 
best books, and I knew intimately all 
the details of their experiences. The 
prophets, however, were far above me. 
Elijah and Elisha were all right, but 
the ones who wrote did not speak to my 
condition. I knew it must all be won- 
derful, and I believed that they were 
speaking for God, but I did not under- 
stand what they meant. It was all a 
puzzle which nobody could solve for me, 



50 A Boy's Religion. 

and it was only much later, when I 
knew the history which called forth 
these messages, that I learned to love 
and appreciate them. 

Before I began the New Testament 
I was well enough to go out, so that my 
reading stopped, and it was not until 
much later that I got deeply hold of 
that message which came from the Mas- 
ter. The Old Testament was the book 
of my boyhood. My heroes and hero- 
ines were there. It gave s me my first 
poetry and my first history, and I got 
my growing ideas of God from it. The 
idea of choice, the fact that God chose 
a people and that He chose individuals 
for His missions, was rooted in my 
thought. 

It was during this year that a large 
company of the neighbors met at our 
house to study the Bible one evening 
in the week, and I offered to let them 
question me as long as. they wished on 
any events of the Old Testament, and 



The Search of the Scriptures. 51 

I did not fail. It was a boyish confi- 
dence, which I should not show now, 
but it will make clear that this Book 
had been made my own. 



Ftstttns jFrtnt&s. 



IV. 

Utgitmg Jrtentos. 

Nobody ever quite realizes how his 
life is being woven day by day out of a 
myriad of invisible threads. But, in 
fact, each unnoticed influence and every 
imperceptible tug up or down which the 
ordinary daily experience furnishes are 
silently making the life and shaping its 
course. The commonplace present we 
hardly count because we are always 
looking back on a past or dreaming 
ahead into a rosy future, which will be 
full of wonderful and epoch-making 
events. And yet all the time, in spite 
of us, the future is being made out of 
the present, and the stuff of our future 
is to be what we are now weaving in. 
We have only to look back to see how 
true this is. We never really cut loose 



56 A Boy J s Religion. 

from our old selves; the threads which 
the boy wove in are still in the struc- 
ture w T hen manhood finds him. The 
tastes we formed, the habits we ac- 
quired, the ambitions we fed, the be- 
liefs we grew up in, are still a part of 
us. All this makes childhood and youth 
momentously important and critical pe- 
riods. The river may become a Mis- 
sissippi and water half a continent, but 
its whole course will be determined by 
the tip of the current up at its source. 
Among the many influences which 
went to form and determine my early 
life — and so in a measure my whole life 
— I should give a large place to the 
visits of ministering Friends who came 
to us. No such system of interchange 
has been practiced among any other re- 
ligious people as that which used to be 
familiar among Friends. My great 
uncle drove in his carriage from Maine 
to Indiana at least twice on religious 
visits, visiting families and attending 



Visiting Friends. 57 

meetings as he went and living much 
of the time on the way in his carriage. 
It was a very common and ordinary 
matter for New England Friends to 
drive to the " Provinces " on religious 
visits, and as soon as the railroads made 
travel easy, the small meetings even in 
remote corners had opportunities to see 
and hear Friends from every part of the 
country, and often from over seas. 

They were frequently strangely un- 
like our native, home-born folks, with 
odd-looking clothes and unusual accents 
of speech. Some possessed marked cul- 
ture and refinement, and some were 
hardly able to construct a sentence 
which did not violate the ordinary rules 
of Goold Brown's Grammar. They all 
came from a world as unknown to me as 
was the African jungle, and they were 
curiosities of a very high order to be 
gazed at and listened to. It is not easy 
to explain why a person who comes 
from a place a thousand miles away 



58 A Boy's Religion. 

should impress one so much more than 
an equally good person whom one meets 
every day, but the fact remains. Fam- 
iliarity does play havoc with us all. The 
prophet always dwells somewhere else 
than where we have settled. He is al- 
ways in another town, in another state 
— never one of the well-known figures 
of our own neighborhood. These men 
and women who seemed so wonderful 
to me were often very ordinary persons 
at home. Their neighbors had no idea 
that they were lights of the first mag- 
nitude, but when they came into our 
horizon like a new star, with no known 
history to judge them by, I always be- 
lieved them to be remarkable persons, 
and very often they were such. 

Then, too, I felt a certain awe be- 
cause they always came with " a con- 
cern/' which means that they had left 
their homes and had undertaken the 
long journey because they had received 
an unmistakable and irresistible call to 



Visiting Friends. 59 

go out and speak what was given them. 
This was no ordinary visit. Here was 
a man under our roof who had come be- 
cause God sent him. I supposed that 
he had something inside which had told 
him to go, and where to go, and that 
this " something inside " told him ex- 
actly what to say when he spoke to us. 
In my childish thought I put these " be- 
loved brothers with minutes " in a very 
high class, with an inspiration only a 
little below that which the writers of 
the Bible possessed. That I took this 
view was partly due to the fact that so 
many of them " spoke to the state and 
condition " of some one either in our 
family or in the neighborhood. These 
visiting ministers had a way of seeing 
through your life and of prophesying 
your future, which made one solemn 
when they spoke. 

While a company of neighbors were 
gathered in our sitting-room, a Friend 
of this authoritative sort had been sit- 



60 A Boy's Religion. 

ting in silence, when he quietly rose and 
asked a man in the room to stand up. 
He then asked a woman who was pres- 
ent to stand by the side of the man. 
With deep reverence and solemnity, he 
said: "I think that will do, and I be- 
lieve it has the divine approval." Not 
long after, this couple, thus encouraged, 
were joined in marriage, and entered 
upon a union which was much blessed. 
Nobody thought of this in a light way. 
It was taken as an undoubted expres- 
sion of the will of God. 

Not far from us a visiting Friend of 
great weight and power was holding a 
meeting by appointment. A large com- 
pany came to hear him because he had 
a remarkable gift. One man in the 
community who had the reputation of 
being a sceptic had not gone. This man 
got on horseback and started for the vil- 
lage by a road which passed the one thatt 
led into the meeting-house. As he rode 
along he felt irresistibly impressed that 



Visiting Friends. 61 

he ought to go to meeting, but he would 
not give in. As he came near the junc- 
tion of the roads he threw the reins on 
the horse's neck, and resolved to go 
whichever way the horse took him. 
Contrary to his well-formed habit, the 
horse turned in to the meeting-house, 
and the man went into the meeting. 

The house was full, and the minister 
was preaching a powerful sermon. The 
man dropped into a seat by the door, 
as much unnoticed as possible. Sudden- 
ly the minister stopped, fixed his eye, 
and said, " So thou decided to leave it 
to thy horse. It would have been well 
to have left it to the horse years ago." 
Then he preached a direct and search- 
ing sermon, which reached this man's 
life and changed the whole current of 
his thought. 

These were no rare and isolated inci- 
dents. Such things were frequent. One 
Friend in particular, who used to come 
from a distant yearly meeting, was 



62 A Boy's Religion. 

strikingly gifted to see into the hidden 
secrets of the heart, and I had an un- 
questioning belief in her power to read 
a life. Another Friend — this time 
from England — had astonished every- 
body at monthly meeting by preaching: 
a sermon which unfolded the condition! 
of a prominent member of the meeting 
so plainly that it seemed as though Grod 
had sent a direct message. 

xlll these things worked upon me and 
impressed me; and then, still further, 
these far-traveled visitors would sit by 
our hearth and tell of their remarkable 
experiences in other places: — how the 
Lord had sent them out with nothing, 
and had provided for them, or how they 
had been led into strange and unexpect- 
ed service, or how they had felt out 
the condition of some family or meet- 
ing which they had visited, — until II 
learned to believe that ministers — att 
least those that came from a distance — 
were, if not little lower than an- 



Visiting Friends. 63 

gels, then surely considerably higher 
than ordinary mortals. I never now see 
one of these persons who were the 
prophets of my childhood without add- 
ing something to him for memory's 
sake, and, as I listen, his words mean 
more to me than they otherwise would, 
because I color them with my childish 
belief that he must be greater and more 
gifted than other persons — for had not 
God sent him to us ? 

Whenever such visitor as I have been 
describing came we had an " opportun- 
ity/' or a " tunity," as we children 
named it, when we were too small to 
pronounce both ends of a long word. 
The choice of this word indicates a hap- 
py insight and shrewd wisdom on the 
part of those who used the word, for an 
" opportunity/' put in plain, cold lan- 
guage, was nothing more nor less than a 
religious meeting held in the home by 
the ministering Friend, who was " vis- 
iting families." It never was quite set- 



64 A Boy's Religion. 

tied in my mind whether it was an " op- 
portunity " for the visitor or for the 
family, but it always made a sharp and 
immediate break with whatever we 
were doing at the time. If we were 
playing when the word came, the game 
was left half finished; if we were work- 
ing, the task was interrupted, and we 
all gathered in the little sitting-room 
with the visitor, who had come from far 
with a " concern " for us. 

Not infrequently I heard my own 
name spoken as the minister raised his 
voice in prayer, and God was asked by 
this special servant of His to help me. 
I knew that such a prayer would count, 
and I always felt more confidence in 
myself after this kind of an " opportun- 
ity " was over. 

But I half feared, too, that some of 
these penetrating souls would see how 
very bad I was, and how impossible it 
was for me to keep good very long. 
One Friend came who went to sleep on 



Visiting Friends. 65 

our sitting room sofa, and in her sleep 
suddenly began to preach. We were all 
called in, and for more than half an 
hour she poured forth a remarkable gos- 
pel message, which filled me with awe, 
and when she woke up she had no 
knowledge that she had said anything. 
This greatly increased my faith in the 
Bible stories which told how God 
showed things in dreams. 

Once a dear, saintly man, who was as 
graceful and courtly as though he had 
been a knight of Arthur's Round Table, 
and whose kindly face has been a bene- 
diction to thousands, came to visit us. 
He brought with him a young man who 
had run away from the Southern army 
because he could not fight, and who had 
afterwards become a Friend. They 
were both most unusual men, and I had 
hardly moved while I was listening to 
their words, which fascinated me and 
moved me. The saintly man walked over 
to me and put his hands on my head, 



66 A Boy's Religion. 

and slowly announced his prophecy 
about me. I was then ten years old. 
What he said would ordinarily have 
made little impression. But I fully be- 
lieved that he knew what he was saying, 
and the words remained with me as an 
inspiration long after the man himself 
had forgotten that he spoke them. They 
have since been fulfilled in every re- 
spect. 

I am not now concerned with the in- 
fluence of these itinerant ministers in 
the public meetings which they attend- 
ed. That must wait for a later paper. 
I am speaking only of the personal in- 
fluence in the homes that they visited. 
They told us of life and work in far-off 
lands. They interested us with their 
narratives, and in our narrow life they 
performed somewhat the service of the 
wandering minstrel in the days of the 
old castles. They gave us new experi- 
ences, a touch of wider life and farther- 
reaching associations, and for me, at 



Visiting Friends. 67 

least, they made the connection with 
God more real. I got from them a 
clearer sense of what I might be, and it 
was largely because I believed that men 
and women had been sent from remote 
lands to visit us that I was so sure that 
we were a chosen people. 



V. 

ftfje Pftgfj Seats. 

Never again in this world will any 
one see such a meeting as the one to 
which I went twice in the week, after 
I was old enough to sit upright in a 
seat. Such a meeting will not be seen 
again simply because the kind is pass- 
ing away, and because the characters 
who composed it were absolutely orig- 
inal and unique — not to be matched 
anywhere. The meeting-house was a 
plain wooden building, with unpainted 
seats, and divided into two equal halves 
by wooden " shutters/' which could be 
raised or lowered to make two rooms or 
one of the house as occasion required. 
Along the front ran two elevated 
seats, one above the other — called the 
" high seats " — where the ministers 



72 A Boy's Religion, 

and elders sat, facing the body of the 
house. We lived three miles from the 
meeting-house, over a rocky, hilly road, 
running all the way through woods. 
The question, however, was never 
raised whether we should or should not 
go to meeting, any more than it was 
whether we should or should not have 
dinner. Even the horse knew that he 
was foreordained to these bi-weekly 
trips, and to his long, quiet wait in the 
meeting-house " shed." The house was 
well filled — men on one side and women 
on the other. All the women past mid- 
dle life wore the long, stiff, flaring bon- 
net, covered with grey silk, with a cape 
behind, which was the mark of good 
standing in our Quaker community. 
The elder ones wore underneath a 
dainty white muslin cap. The men of 
our meeting had no set dress, though 
one or two ancient Friends had broad 
beaver hats and collarless coats, which 
brought down to our time the garb of 




THE MEETING HOUSE. 



The High Seats. 73 

sanctity which prevailed a generation 
before. 

There were two rows of " high- 
seat " Friends on each side, and, 
though none of them had been to " Ox- 
ford or Cambridge," nor, I may add, to 
any institution more advanced than a 
high school, there were some of God's 
anointed ministers in that little group. 
The one who " sat at the head " on the 
men's side and the one who occupied 
the similar place on the women's side 
had been to the Holy Land, and, when 
I began to go to meeting, had recent- 
ly returned from that land, all fresh 
with the impressions which their trav- 
els had made upon them, and full of 
living, vivid pictures of the scenes 
where the great events in the world's 
spiritual history had come to pass. They 
both had a marvelous power of interest- 
ing, and they fixed attention both by 
message and manner. 

The Friend on the men's side spoke 



74 A Boy's Religion. 

more often from the Old Testament, 
and, in his original, eloquent style, 
made some one of the characters live 
and act his part before our eyes. His 
wife, with a voice of mingled softness 
and power, and a grace that a queen 
might have envied, generally made the 
story of redeeming love her theme, and 
she loved to follow the steps of the 
" blessed feet " from the early days in 
Nazareth until they were pierced on 
Calvary. She often saw tears glisten in 
the corners of eyes as she spoke. I was 
a boy, and I loved the story of David 
and his daring deeds, or the dramatic 
course of Joseph in Egypt, better. I 
understood it all, and I knew that I 
would have done the same thing — if I_ 
had dared! I used to feel my whole 
self go out in interest as I followed 
these descriptions. 

They both made sin awfully real, and 
they left no shadow of doubt of its ul- 
timate effect, but the striking note of 



The High Seats. 75 

their preaching was the beauty and joy 
and peace which the true life gives. 
They made religion attractive. They 
told the story of the cross so that I felt 
its power. In every sermon there 
would break out some great word about 
the meaning and possibility of life, un- 
til, boy as I was, I wanted to be some- 
thing and do something to show that I 
appreciated such love. 

There was also in this " high-seat " 
group a woman who wore the white 
flower of a holy life. She had passed 
through deep trials, and had tasted bit- 
ter cups, but she had won her way into 
the secrets of the Lord. She lacked 
some qualities which a public speaker 
needs, but her inward grace and daily 
converse with her Lord more than made 
up the lack. Her ministry was convinc- 
ing beyond all argument, and her rising 
or kneeling always left a fragrance 
which lasted after meeting broke. 

On the other side was one who spoke 



76 A Boy J s Religion. 

with a foreign accent, who had come 
among us from a distant land. He, too, 
had come through hard, trying experi- 
ences, but he had come out bloom-fur- 
naced and with a marvelous story of 
victory. Gifted he was with rare 
powers of speech, full of striking inci- 
dents, apt with illustrations, and always 
ready with a poetic passage which fitted 
his theme. To him I listened as a child 
to a loved story. 

Very often in these meetings, which 
held for two hours, there were long 
periods of silence, for we never had 
singing. I do not think anybody ever 
told me what the silence was for. T 
used to sit and wonder what other peo- 
ple were thinking of. I sometimes tried 
to see how much I could count before 
something would happen! But some- 
times a real spiritual wave would go 
over the meeting in these silent times, 
which made me feel very solemn, and 
carried me — careless boy though I was 



The High Seats. 77 

— down into something which was 
deeper than my own thoughts, and gave 
me a momentary sense of that Spirit 
who has been the light of men in all 
ages and in all lands. 

But I have been speaking of our 
meeting as though it were somewhat 
ideal — a place where only uplifting and 
edifying words were heard, and where 
we were all baptized into the unity of 
the one Spirit. Alas, the millennium 
was still a good way off, and the check- 
erboard condition of life, which we all 
know so well — with squares of black as 
well as squares of white — prevailed 
here also. I doubt if any small com- 
pany of individuals ever had a larger 
share of " peculiar " persons. The New 
Englander who has been unspoiled by 
city influences is almost always " orig- 
inal " — different from everybody else. 
He is very apt to adopt some pet idea, 
and rock and feed it until it possesses 
him. He will have his own quaint way 



78 A Boy's Religion. 

of telling it, but let him start where he 
may, he is sure to come round to it and 
give it voice. Once let such a person 
settle down into an idea and. a peculiar 
way of expressing it, one might almost 
as well try to change the path of the 
zodiac as to get him out of his rut. Our 
meeting was richly supplied with char- 
acters who traveled round and round 
their single truth, their mighty discov- 
ery, until we knew every turn and twist 
in their mental windings. No sermon 
could possibly be preached which did 
not start off one or more of these teth- 
ered souls around the beaten path of his 
favorite idea. They each felt that the 
other's idea was wrong, or empty, and 
that the meeting was not edified by it, 
and each one of them felt that the com- 
ing together was not entirely profitable 
unless he had unburdened his spirit and 
rolled his great truth on the meeting. 
They all had funny ways of speaking 
and of making gestures — curious ex- 



The High Seats. 79 

pressions appeared from, time to time, 
and the frequent repetition of them 
only made them sound more odd. One 
of these characters wore a strange and 
remarkable garb, which he believed was 
required of him, and this added to the 
quaintness of his speaking, which of it- 
self was queer almost beyond belief. 

All this was a hard test on a boy. 
Imitation is one of the earliest in- 
stincts. From the first smile of the 
baby the imitative instinct works. It 
is almost impossible not to imitate odd 
and curious ways, and we children used 
to play meeting, and act over and over 
the characteristic things which we 
heard, until it got ever more difficult 
to sit through them with sober faces. 
The most wonderful thing, however, 
was the patience and the grace of the 
weighty members of the meeting in 
dealing with these situations. They 
held rigidly to the freedom of speech. 
The difference between the great gospel 



80 A Boy's Religion. 

message which came from one of the 
saints of the meeting and the queer de- 
liverance which often proceeded from 
the odd prophets of a single idea was 
something remarkable. But the meet- 
ing steadfastly gave the latter his op- 
portunity. It was plainly a trial, but 
the jarring notes only made it all the 
more necessary for the spiritual mem- 
bers to do their part to make the tone 
of the meeting high. Their faith in the 
power of truth, their saintly patience 
and gentleness under difficulties, had 
their effect upon us all, and we got so 
that we could pass from the soul-stir- 
ring sermon on " Who is this that com- 
eth from Edom, with dyed garments 
from Bozrah ? " to the weird, shrill 
words, " I wonder what difference it 
makes what we think. The question 
ain't whether or no we think so ; no, not 
by no means ! " and feel almost no 
shock. Gradually we learned to get the 
good and to pass the other by. 



Cfte Sense of tije Jtteeting. 



VI. 

W§t Setts* of tfje ftteettttg. 

" If Friends' minds are easy, I ap- 
prehend it may now be a suitable time 
to lower the shutters and proceed to the 
business of the meeting." As the ven- 
erable elder at the head of the meeting 
spoke these words, slowly and solemnly, 
he raised his broad-brim and put it on 
his head with considerable dignity, and 
we children knew that the " first meet- 
ing " was over. In these modern days 
a dinner is served " between the meet- 
ings/' but in my boyhood days no such 
thing ever happened. Not even the 
hungry boy got a bite until the affairs 
of the Church were properly settled. 
Creak, creak, creak — we heard the mid- 
dle " shutters " coming down from 
above to divide the men from the wo- 



84 A Boy's Religion. 

men. I could never imagine how it was 
done ! No human instrument was ever 
anywhere visible. The ancient elder 
spoke, and lo, the wonder worked! 
Later, when the investigating age was 
upon me, I crawled up a ladder into the 
loft and solved the mystery; but in the 
early period it seemed as though the 
same spirit which " moved " the solemn 
man to put on his hat was also in the 
descending shutters, which no visible 
hand touched ! 

I used always to sit on the " men's 
side," but I sat close up by the parti- 
tion, and ever and anon I caught the 
notes of a woman's voice breaking in 
upon our " business " with a strong out- 
pouring of prayer or the earnest word 
of counsel, for the women had less 
" business " than the men, and hence 
" religious exercises " filtered all 
through their " second meeting." It 
was somewhat so on the men's side, 
though to a less extent. But even here 



The Sense of the Meeting. 85 

it was impossible to draw any line be- 
tween " business " and " religious exer- 
cise." A solemn religious tinge col- 
ored everything, even the driest items 
of business, and I believe the spiritual 
tide often rose higher in the " second 
meeting " than in the first — particular- 
ly if there was a visiting minister pres- 
ent. 

By the " world's " methods, all our 
business could have been transacted in 
twenty minutes. We often spent two 
hours at it, because every affair had to 
be soaked in a spiritual atmosphere un- 
til the dew of religion settled on it ! 
Above, in the " high seats," sat two 
men at a table fastened by hinges to 
the minister's rail. This table was 
swung up and held by a perpendicular 
stick beneath. On it lay the old rec- 
ord-book, a copy of the " discipline," 
and papers of all sorts. The " clerk," 
the main man of the two at the desk, 
was another one of those marvelous be- 



86 A Boy's Religion. 

ings who seemed to me to know every- 
thing by means of something unseen 
working inside him ! How could he tell 
what " Friends " wanted done ? — and 
yet he always knew. No votes were 
cast. Everybody said something in his 
own peculiar way. A moment of si- 
lence would come, and the clerk would 
rise and say: " It appears that it is the 
sense of the meeting " to do thus and 
so. Spontaneously from all parts of the 
house would come from variously- 
pitched voices: "I unite with that," 
" So do I," " That is my mind/' " I 
should be easy to have it so." And so 
we passed to the next subject. 

Occasionally there would be a Friend 
who had " a stop in his mind/' or who 
" didn't feel easy " to have things go as 
the rest believed they should go. If he 
was a " weighty Friend/' whose judg- 
ment had been proved through a long 
past, his " stop " would effectually set- 
tle the matter; but if he was a persist- 



The Sense of the Meeting. 87 

ent and somewhat cantakerous objector, 
the clerk would quietly announce that 
the " weight of the meeting " seemed 
decidedly favorable to action. 

The longest stretch of business was 
always over the " queries." These 
were original inventions of the Quaker, 
and they have no parallel in any other 
religious body. Like many other things, 
the " queries/' with their carefully- 
rendered answers, have undergone a 
change. They take a less important 
place now, and the boy of to-day may 
not tell of them when he gives his im- 
pressions to the next generation. Bug 
in my day they were still alive, and the 
meeting took them seriously enough. 

" Are all meetings regularly held ? " 
" Are Friends careful to observe the 
hour ? " " Do Friends keep from all 
unbecoming behavior therein ? " " Are 
love and unity maintained ? " " Are 
tale-bearing and detraction guarded 
against ? " " Do Friends pay their bills, 



88 A Boy's Religion. 

settle their accounts, and live within 
the bounds of their circumstances ? " 
" Do they read the Holy Scriptures in 
their families, and bring up their chil- 
dren in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord ? " " If differences arise, ar<> 
measures taken to end them speedily? " 
" Is the discipline administered timely 
and impartially ? " 

Each separate meeting sent its spe- 
cial set of answers for this public con- 
fessional. " Love and unity are not so 
well maintained as we could wish." 
" Some Friends do not observe the 
hour." " Mostly kept from unbecom- 
ing behavior, though a few cases of 
sleeping in meeting have been ob- 
served." " Friends generally bring up 
their children in the nurture and ad- 
monition of the Lord." I had no idea 
what that meant, though I supposed it 
meant " to be good." 

After the answers were read, we lis- 
tened to grave preachments on these va- 



The Sense of the Meeting. 89 

rious lines which " were queried after/' 
as the phrase used to run. What got 
said on these occasions was not very 
juicy food for a boy, though the stand- 
ard of life which was set up in these 
times of examination did, after all., 
have a silent influence which left a 
good deposit behind. 

There were tw^o transactions which 
were always exciting, and I used each 
time to live in hope that they would 
come off. One was " the declaration 
of intentions of marriage." When such 
an event occurred the man and woman 
came in and sat down together, facing 
the meeting in the completest possible 
hush. It was an ordeal which made the 
couple hesitate to rush into marriage 
until they felt pretty sure that the 
match was made in heaven. Solemnly 
they rose, with the parents standing on 
each side, and informed us that they 
purposed taking each other in marriage, 
and the parents announced their con- 



90 A Boys Religion. 

sent. The meeting " united/ 5 and per- 
mission was given " to proceed." The 
marriage itself came off at an even 
more solemn meeting, when the man 
and woman took each other " until 
death should separate." I remember 
one of these occasions, when the fright- 
ened groom took the bride "to be his 
husband," which made the meeting less 
solemn than usual. 

The other interesting event was the 
liberation of ministers for religious ser- 
vice " in other parts." If the minister 
was a woman Friend, as often hap- 
pened in our meeting, she came in from 
the other side with " a companion. 1 ' 
They walked up the aisle and sat down 
with bowed heads. Slowly the bonnet 
strings were untied, the bonnet handed 
to the companion, and the ministering 
woman rose to say that for a long time 
the Lord had been calling her to a ser- 
vice in a distant yearly meeting; that 
she had put it off. not feeling that she 



The Sense of the Meeting. 91 

could undertake so important a work, 
but that her mind could not get any 
peace; and now she had come to ask 
Friends to release her for this service. 
One after another the Friends would 
I concur in this concern/' and the bless- 
ing of the Lord would be invoked upon 
the messenger who was going forth. 

Some of these occasions were of a 
heavenly sort, and the voices of strong 
men choked in tears as a beloved 
brother or sister was equipped and set 
free. From this little meeting heralds 
went out to almost every part of the 
world, and the act of liberation was 
something never to be forgotten, — only 
to be surpassed by the deep rejoicing 
which stirred the same company when 
the journey was over and " the minutes 
were returned." 

It is all very well now to sit down at 
a comfortable desk and write of what 
happened in those long business meet- 
ings. But the kind reader will please 






92 A Boy's Religion. 

remember that the uncushioned seats 
were hard in those days, and that a 
boy's stomach will not be fed with 
" considerations on the state of the 
Church " ! Long before the " conclud- 
ing minute " was read a rebellion was 
well under way within. The vivid pic- 
ture of that steaming dinner which w r as 
(to the boy) the real event of those 
days, blotted out the importance of pre- 
serving love and unity, or any of the 
other desirable things which concerned 
the elders. At length the happy mo- 
ment came, — " We now separate, pro- 
posing to meet again at the usual time 
and place, if the Lord permit. " 

With this began the invasion of the* 
homes in the neighborhood. Every 
dining-room had its long table, and am 
elastic supply to fit the rather reckless 
invitations which all members of the 
family gave with little or no consulta- 
tion. Here was one place where a boy 
counted as much as a man! In the 



The Sense of the Meeting. 93 

meeting he had no part to play, he was 
not considered, but the havoc he 
wrought on the dinner made him a per- 
son of some importance ! If he got 
crowded out to the second table the de- 
lay only made him a more dangerous 
element to reckon with ! 

No boy who has had the fortune of 
being taken to monthly or quarterly 
meeting in the good old days of positive 
religion and genuine hospitality will 
forget what it meant, so long as he re- 
members anything. 



€t)t Extt of Itnotole&ge. 



VII. 

W§z Exzz of Itnofoletige, 

God was just as real a being to me all 
through my early boyhood as was any 
one of the persons in our nearest neigh- 
bor's house. At home He was talked 
with every morning, and spoken of all 
day in a variety of ways. If any sort 
of a crisis was near us His help was 
asked, in as simple and confident a way 
as Ave asked a neighbor's help when we 
needed it. Once when a great danger 
was all day threatening to fall upon our 
family, we quietly met in the living- 
room and sat down together, and asked 
God to deliver us from our trouble. 
Then mother took the Bible, and al- 
lowed it to open of itself to a chapter 
which was meant for us. It opened to 
the ninety-first Psalm, and I can still 



98 A Boy's Religion. 

remember the thrill which went over 
me and the confidence which rose up in 
me as she read: " There shall no evil 
befall thee, neither shall any plague 
come nigh thy dwelling." No one of 
us for a moment doubted these words. 
They came as though they had been 
spoken directly to us from the sky, and 
they proved true. 

A hundred things which occurred 
convinced me that God was a real per- 
son who took care of us, who knew all 
about us, and who was all the time near 
by. Again and again I was told to do 
some particular thing because " God 
wanted me to do it," or not to do some- 
thing because " God would not like to 
have me do it." " How does thee think 
God will feel ? " were the words which 
met me when I had gone wrong. 

Now this overwhelming conviction 
that I was more closely and immediate- 
ly under God's care and observation 
than I was under the eve of the teacher 



The Tree of Knowledge. 99 

in the little school-room, where almost 
no act escaped notice, would have been 
very comforting if I had always been 
good. I really did enjoy thinking, when 
I had in a rare moment done a good 
thing, that God was seeing it and liking 
me for it. But, alas, the balance was 
always on the wrong side ! I meant to 
be good. I knew I ought to be. Al- 
most from babyhood I had been told 
that God wanted to use me in His ser- 
vice, but spite of everything I was for- 
ever finding myself in the wrong path. 
The happy period of innocence, — the 
brief lease of the garden of Eden which, 
all unconsciously, every child has, — 
was for me soon over. The first mouth- 
ful of the apple from the tree of knowl- 
edge of good and evil is back of the 
period of memory, but as far back as T 
can go I find my Eden very badly lost. 
No day in that little life of mine was 
without its pangs, and many of them 
gave me a real terror. My whole up- 

L.ofC 



100 A Boy's Religion. 

bringing had given me a quick, sensi- 
tive and tender heart, a most exalted 
idea of duty, a keen vision of the good 
life, and, as I have said, a certainty that 
God was entering all my acts and do- 
ings in His great books. In my good 
moments no boy ever was better, and 
the casual visitor put me down as a 
model boy, — perhaps as almost too good 
to grow up. 

But in reality I was a typical sinner. 
I did precisely the things I knew I 
ought not to. I can plainly remember 
walking straight ahead in a sinful 
course with every string of my con- 
science tugging at my heart to pull me 
back. As soon as I got with " the 
other boys " I let the din of their sug- 
gestions of attractive things drown out 
the low whispers of the tender heart, 
and we did the things which boys usual- 
ly do. It w r ent all right while the ex- 
citement lasted, and, at a pinch, I eas- 
ily became the leader in some desperate 



The Tree of Knowledge. 101 

undertaking, but on the way home 
alone I became uncomfortable and low- 
spirited. It was not so much that I 
disliked the sure questioning which 
would come ; and that I should find dif- 
ficulty in showing that my day had been 
spent in an edifying way, but it was 
rather a deep, dull feeling that I had 
gone back on my true self, and that I 
had broken faith with the One Person 
who knew me altogether. 

One particular sin — at least I felt it 
a sin — dogged me for years. I do not 
remember when I began it, or when 1 
first realized that the thing was wrong, 
but I learned at a very early period 
what a mighty undertaking it is to fight 
down a sin. I hated it, and still I did 
it. Almost every time I read the Bible 
I opened to some passage which just hit 
my case. I felt sure the passage was 
meant for me, and in my fear I would 
resolve to be good all the rest of my 
days. But any slight, easy temptation 



102 A Boy's Religion. 

would break every fence I had so pain- 
fully builded, and I would find myself 
off again in the enemy's pasture. 

My outside life was just like that of 
any healthy, growing boy. I played 
boy's games, learned to swim and dive, 
sail and fish, hunt and skate, and in the 
times between I went to school and 
worked on the farm. It looked from 
the outside as though this made up the 
whole of my life. But looked at from 
within, my life was mostly an invisible 
battle. More real than the snow fort 
which we stormed amid a flight of snow- 
balls until we dislodged the possessors 
of it, was this unseen stronghold of an 
enemy, who was dislodged only to come 
back into his fort stronger than ever, so 
that my assaults seemed fruitless and 
vain. 

All the time those looking on saw- 
only a careless boy, drifting into the 
ways of the reckless, thoughtless crowd 
of village boys who seemed to have no 



. 








THE AUTHOR. IK BOYHOOD. 



The Tree of Knowledge. 103 

no fear of God or man. 
How little one knows what goes on deep 
within the heart, or how sensitive the 
soul may be when the acts indicate only 
a hardened nature ! At no period of 
life have I more earnestly longed to be 
good than in the dark days of growing 
self-will when I seemed the worst. 
What a problem, to deal with a boy so 
as to reach this deeper, truer self which 
seems lost, and help him to find himself 
and something better than himself! 

The turning point, though by no 
means the attainment, came for me in a 
very simple incident — of blessed mem- 
ory. I had gone a step farther than 
usual, and had done something which 
grieved everybody at home, and I ex- 
pected a severe punishment, which was 
administered with extreme infrequency 
in our home. To my surprise my 
mother took me by the hand and led me 
to my room; then she solemnly kneeled 
down by me, and offered a prayer which 



104 A Boy's Religion. 

reached the very inmost soul of me, and 
reached also the real Helper. No holy 
of holies could ever have seemed to the 
pious Jew more awful with the presence 
of God than that chamber seemed to 
me. It was one thing to hear prayer 
in the meeting-house, or in the assem- 
bled family, but quite another thing to 
hear my own case laid before God in 
words which made me see just what I 
was, and no less clearly what I ought 
to be, and what with His help I might 
be. I learned that day what a mother 
was for ! And though I was still far 
from won, I was at least where I could 
more distinctly feel the thread between 
my soul and the Father quiver and 
draw me. 



©fje Jftomeitt to DectDe. 



VIII. 

Wfyz JHoment to ©ecttie. 

I hesitate to speak of such sacred 
things as inward experiences, but it is 
manifestly impossible to touch the 
heart of one's religion, even in boy- 
hood, without a few words of personal 
confession. They shall be as simple, 
direct and honest as I can make them. 
From the nature of the case the events 
of one's inward life are too private and 
personal to be really " described " ; the 
most that one can do is to hint at what 
has gone on within, and to give some 
" signs " which others may interpret as 
best they can from their own experi- 
ence. 

I have already told how, little by lit- 
tle, I found myself living a divided life, 
I was utterly dissatisfied with myself, 



108 A Boy's Religion. 

and yet I did not know what had hap- 
pened. Somehow I had passed a boun- 
dary. I was no longer a careless, happy- 
go-lncky boy, satisfied if only I had 
enough to eat and could play as many 
hours as I wanted to. There was a 
flaming sword at every path which led 
back to the old Eden of peaceful, inno- 
cent, happy childhood. Nobody under- 
stood me any more, but the worst of it 
was that I did not in the least under- 
stand myself. I gave up all hope of 
growing good. It was no use trying. I 
simply could not succeed. The harder 
I tried the more I knew I was failing. 
My conscience was as sensitive as a 
compass-needle; it felt every deviation 
and recorded every sin, but there was 
no great ground-swell within which 
kept me moving toward righteousness. 
I was in very truth a double personal- 
ity, for I hated sin. I loved goodness. 
I knew how awful it was to waste my 
life, and yet I went to bed night after 



-j 






The Moment to Decide. 109 



night with the heavy feeling upon me 
that I was farther than ever from any 
goodness, and frightened at my day's 
list of failures. 

I never talked with any one about 
my troubles, and I do not believe those 
nearest me realized that I was having a 
crisis, for there was no outward sign of 
it. This whole situation, now so hard 
to describe clearly, would hardly be 
worth telling about, and would cer- 
tainly not here come to light, if it were 
not for the fact that it is an experience 
which is well-nigh universal, and one 
which needs more attention than it 
usually gets. 

There is in one's early life a whole 
series of budding periods when some 
new hunger or desire suddenly sprouts 
out into a strange activity. Some new 
capacity dawns and demands a career 
for itself. The impulse to suck is of 
course the earliest. The desire to kick 
the little legs and to crow almost over- 



110 A Boy's Religion. 

masters a healthy baby. Without any 
forewarning, the budding moment 
comes for creeping, and this most primi- 
tive mode of travel has its triumphant 
course. It would apparently last for 
life did not a new impulse bud which in- 
troduces a better kind of locomotion. 
There is now an indescribable stirring 
in the legs, which is the sign that the 
hour has come to teach walking. More 
miraculous still is the hatching out of 
the first word which gives voice to the 
little soul within. This is a veritable 
crisis, and it is little use to try to teach 
speaking until this budding moment has 
come, when the tiny spirit asserts his 
right to be heard! 

But now there comes much later a 
still more critical budding period. The 
small individual self begins to discover 
his incompleteness, and to yearn, how- 
ever vaguely, for that Life in which he 
can find fulfillment. His real hunger 
for God has dawned, and he makes at 



The Moment to Decide. Ill 

the same time the painful discovery of 
his own littleness. He no more knows 
just what it is he wants than he did 
when he had the blind desire to suck. 
He suffers without knowing what his 
trouble is. The more passionate his 
longing for the Infinite Companionship 
is, the more keen is the conviction of 
weakness and sin which settles upon 
him, until he believes he is lost; just as 
that nameless sadness on the face of a 
teething child gives the impression that 
he believes the universe is against him. 
Now, the reason that this particular 
budding crisis, when the spiritual life is 
dawning, is so much more serious than 
the previous ones, is that we know so 
little how to deal with it, and if it is not 
dealt with in the right way the whole 
life will be dwarfed or twisted out of 
its proper course. We can show the 
child how to walk, but we bungle when 
we come to the problem of helping a 
soul make his adjustment with the In- 



112 A Boy's Religion. 

finite. Then, too, what succeeds glori- 
ously with one such person proves just 
the wrong method of approach with an- 
other. 

While I was in this crisis — with an 
old self not dead and a new self not 
born, and ignorant of what these sun- 
rise streaks on my chaos really meant 
— we had a new kind of meeting in our 
little community. It was in the old 
schoolhouse, and because too many 
came for the seats to hold, we put 
boards across and filled the aisles, and 
then brought benches and filled the 
open space in front, where boys in 
school time frequently stood as penalty 
for small offences. The minister came 
from a distant town, and bore the dis- 
tinction of having " elder " before his 
name. He was a plain, simple, straight- 
forward, good man, who knew a few 
clear truths of Christianity, and he told 
them impressively. 

At first we boys, who filled a large 






■l 




THE SCHOOL HOT'SE. 






The Moment to Decide. 113 



corner, went for fun, and because we 
liked to sing the new hymns which he 
introduced — the Sankey hymns, which 
were then all fresh from the writer's 
pen, and " singing in meeting " was a 
most w r onderful innovation. It, how- 
ever, soon ceased to be " fun," and 
grew most serious, for I saw that I was 
approaching an unescapable decision. 
Each night it became clearer that there 
were only two kinds of lives — with two 
distinct issues. What had been dim and 
vague in my long struggle had sud- 
denly become sharp and clearly defined. 
I was a poor, sick soul, unable to cure 
myself, and here the remedy was de- 
scribed. I was drifting hopelessly down 
the stream. Now I heard what lay at 
the end of such a course. I knew I 
wanted something which I had always 
just missed, now I heard how a life 
gets completed and saved. 

But here I was a boy among a great 
group of boys who had followed my 



114 A Boy's Religion. 

lead in a hundred boyish pranks. I 
could not take a step without breaking 
a thousand threads which wove my life 
into the past and bound me up with this 
society of my fellows. There were days 
of this seething struggle, during which 
I felt that my entire future was at 
stake. At length one night there came 
a bursting point, and I rose with every 
artery in me throbbing and my heart 
pounding so hard that I thought every- 
body must hear it. With a tremendous 
effort I made my tongue say, " I want 
to be a Christian." Nobody laughed; 
it was still and solemn. I knew I had 
won my first great spiritual victory. 

I had believed that the line between 
the dead self and the new-born being 
was so sharp and definite that if I once 
passed it I should live in perpetual joy, 
and all struggle would henceforth be 
over. On the contrary, I do not think 
any great wave of joy or flood of bliss 
swept over me. I simply knew I had 









The Moment to Decide. 115 

crossed a line. The more I saw what 
the goal was, the more I knew I had 
only made a beginning. The next great 
battle came some days later, when I felt 
that I must get down before the whole 
meeting and pray. I cannot tell to this 
day whether I was afraid of the people 
or whether I was awed at the thought 
of addressing God. I only know that I 
got down and made my lips go, but not 
a word came. I seemed paralyzed at 
the immensity of the undertaking. 
Everybody saw me, but nobody heard 
me. 

In spite of times of swelling joy, 
when I knew that I had really passed a 
crisis in the incubation of a new life, T 
still found that the old self was far 
from dead, and that I often slipped back 
into the ways I had left. The new land 
was in sight, and yet the cables which 
bound me to the old shores were not 
entirely cut. But this much must be 
said, that after that first memorable 



116 A Boy's Religion. 

day in the schoolhouse I never had any 
doubt that God was for me, or any per- 
manent sense that He would let go of 

me. 






&ijr jFaitf) anU tijr &ift. 






IX. 

STfje jFattf) anto tlje ILtfe. 

All through my boyhood I had 
thought of religion as a means of get- 
ting to heaven. The joy and relief 
which came to me in the moment of my 
surrender in the old schoolhouse, were 
saturated with the feeling of a certainty 
of heaven. I always had had a terror 
of death, not because I was afraid that 
my being would be ended by death, but 
much more because I was afraid of wak- 
ing up after death in surroundings 
which would be extremely dreadful. 
I often tried without much success to 
picture the scenery and circumstances 
of my soul after it should " cross the 
river." One of my little playfellows, 
whose life had surely never set toward 
goodness, was suddenly stricken down. 



120 A Boy's Religion. 

I saw him laid away in the unattractive 
little graveyard, but I knew that this 
did not end his career. I wondered 
what was happening to him in his new 
place. How he must want to be alive 
again to get different before his case 
was eternally settled ! But I knew he 
never could have another chance. 

Now, however, I had the joy of feel- 
ing that my soul was saved, that if I 
died, as I had once come very near do- 
ing, I should be in blissful happiness 
forever. It is impossible for any one 
who has not had this experience to real- 
ize in any degree what it means. There 
are few moments in one's life which 
give any joy to compare with it. To 
be suddenly assured in your own soul 
that heaven — all you have ever im- 
agined or dreamed of peace and joy — 
is to be yours, that the celestial gate 
will open at your knock when you come 
to it, — this is certainly a supreme ex- 
perience, and I had the thrill of it. 



The Faith and the Life. 121 

Men and women who are absorbed in 
the strenuous work and rush of this 
busy and material world hardly ever 
fully realize how seriously children 
think of heaven, how real a place it is 
to them. Unseen things are just as 
real to them as seen things are. The 
extreme conscientiousness with which 
some boys and girls are affected, even 
to a morbid degree, often grows out of 
their magnified sense of the reality of 
heaven and hell, and the effect of this 
upon their fears and hopes. And the 
deeper this sense of the unseen, the 
higher will be the joy and peace which 
sweep over the soul when it attains an 
assurance of salvation. This at least is 
borne out in my boyish experience. 

But I soon found, what also I had 
probably all along dimly and vaguely 
known, that religion is concerned with 
something more than getting to heaven. 
It was this " something more " which 
made my new 7 experience not altogether 



122 A Boy's Religion, 

a joyous one. In some degree I real- 
ized now that I must be every day and 
in every place and under all sorts and 
conditions of life a new kind of person. 
I began to see that there was no imme- 
diate prospect of going to heaven, but 
instead of that an unescapable require- 
ment upon me to be good here in the 
complex surroundings of this present 
world. 

I now began to be haunted by the 
idea that I could never really like my- 
self, i.e., be satisfied, until I was every 
bit good, while all the time this attain- 
ment seemed an almost hopeless quest. 
The result was that I had, in this 
period, moments of wonderful happi- 
ness, when I thought of the future life, 
and imagined myself an inhabitant of 
the heavenly city, followed by other 
times of depression, when I saw myself 
as I really was — far from heavenly in 
nature, and as unangelic as boys usually 
are. I kept up a vague hope, which I 



The Faith and the Life. 123 

sometimes put into a prayer, that by 
some miraculous event I might be made 
good, and so have the struggle done 
with; that, in a word, I might anticipate 
heaven, and find out here what it was 
like to be every whit good and do now 
the kind of things I should do when I 
got to be truly an angel. 

I think one of my uncles more than 
anybody else helped me to realize, not 
by what he said, but by what he did, 
that this goodness of character which I 
was after is not something miraculous 
that drops into a soul out of the skies, 
but is rather something which is formed 
within as one faithfully does his set 
tasks, and goes to work with an enthu- 
siastic passion to help make other peo- 
ple good. I saw him growing white and 
bent over with the advance of years, 
but no touch of age in the slightest de- 
gree weakened his efforts to make our 
neighborhood better. He preached the 
gospel on the first day of the week, and 



124 A Boy's Religion, 

the next day worked at a scheme for 
building up a town library. One day 
he was trying to do something to de- 
stroy the saloon and advance the cause 
of temperance, and the next he would 
be raising money to endow an educa- 
tional institution. Now he would be 
busy organizing a local missionary so- 
ciety, and the next day he might be ad- 
vocating a better system of taxation 
for the town. If he drove by he might 
be on his way to the station to start off 
for an extended religious visit, or he 
might be going down the road to visit 
a sick neighbor. In all his work for the 
betterment of man at home and abroad, 
I never saw him discouraged or in 
doubt about the final issue. He was al- 
ways full of hope and courage, and ra- 
diantly happy to be able to work at hu- 
man problems. 

But the thing which impressed me 
most, as a thoughtful boy, was that in 
all this perplexing and wearying work, 



The Faith and the Life. 125 

he was becoming more and more like 
my ideal of a saint. His face was 
sunny; his smile was always ready to 
break out. We were all happier when 
he came, and he himself seemed to have 
a kind of inward peace which was very 
much like what I supposed the heav- 
enly beings had. It had been his 
preaching which had so influenced my 
very early life, but it was much more 
his victorious life, w T hich spoke with an 
unanswerable power like that of a sun- 
set or the starry sky, that influenced 
me now in this critical time. I felt that 
the way to become good was to go to 
work in the power of God to help make 
others good, and to help solve the prob- 
lems of those among whom we live. 

I got a further impression of this 
truth from an event which came at first 
as a calamity. I went out one morning 
in early winter to feed our cattle and 
horses in the barn, and found to my 
horror that a fearful storm in the night 



126 A Boy's Religion. 

had blown the barn down with almost 
everything we possessed in it. It was 
such a wreck as I had never seen. T 
can remember now the way I felt as I 
ran through the neighborhood to call 
the men together to see if we could save 
anything. The news went fast, and be- 
fore the day was over men from near 
and far gathered in our yard. They 
were all hard-working people like our- 
selves, with little wealth beyond their 
own strong hands. But before they 
separated they had decided to go to 
work at once and replace what the 
storm had destroyed. The entire neigh- 
borhood went to work, and the new 
structure rose where the ruin had been. 
It was a simple deed, which perhaps 
many towns could parallel, but it af- 
fected me in a strange way. I saw, as 
I had not before, that these men's re- 
ligion was not an affair of the meeting- 
house; it was not merely a way to get 
to heaven. It was something which 



The Faith and the Life. 127 

made them thoughtful of others and 
ready to sacrifice for others. I saw 
how it worked itself out into practical 
deeds of kindness and righteousness. 
During those days that I worked in the 
cold of a Maine winter, among those 
men with their rough clothes and hard 
hands, I was helping build more than a 
barn; I was forming a wider view of the 
religion which such men as these were 
living by. 



aHje ©teat JUggterg* 

A boy has many sorrows to bear. It 
is very much to be questioned whether 
there is any other decade in the ordi- 
nary person's life which has so many 
periods of grief and sadness as the one 
which covers that marvelous epoch 
from five to fifteen. This is, of course, 
not the generally-accepted view of a 
boy's life. The average is not dark, but 
bright, and yet the pain spots are very 
numerous. 

The fifteen-year-old boy in the coun- 
try has tasted almost every kind of hard 
experience. He can give the moral 
philosopher, who is in search of wis- 
dom, points on the real balance be- 
tween pain and happiness. Iso matter 
how true and watchful his household 



132 A Boy's Religion. 

may be in their relations to him, he still 
has many melancholy times, when he 
feels alone in the universe, with his 
own inward battles to fight which drive 
him apart from men, and make his 
world seem as solitary as Adam's be- 
fore his companion appeared. He does 
not in the remotest degree understand 
himself when he is out of the noisy 
crowd where he has been playing and 
shouting as though he had no more bur- 
dens or problems than the unweaned 
lamb. 

My associations during this trying 
period of inward perplexity and mys- 
tery were almost entirely with com- 
panions who were irreligious, who used 
all the forms of profanity and vulgarity 
known to the country youth. It ap- 
parently never had any serious influ- 
ence upon me. I enjoyed their com- 
pany, liked them, threw myself into 
their fun, and yet I never used their 
expressions, and as soon as I was alone 



The Great Mystery. 133 

again I was in my other world, where 
only God and myself knew of the spir- 
itual conflict. 

It may be inferred that my above- 
stated belief that all boys have their 
lonely times and their hard periods is 
based only on my own experience, while 
the prevailing belief is that most boys 
are careless and akin to the vegetable 
in their lack of serious concern. Those 
who hold that view do not know boys 
well. They will deceive the most watch- 
ful with their unconcern, but the mo- 
ment they are alone, and are no longer 
acting a part, they are another order of 
being. Catch the careless boy unawares 
and touch his quick with skillful finger, 
and you will always find that his tears 
flow extremely easy. 

There is one event which can never 
be repeated in this world, let it come 
when it will. It stands all alone, and 
it leaves a touch on one's entire self 
which all the passing years fail to re- 



134 A Boy's Religion. 

move. That is the death of a mother. 
This came to me while I was still in the 
stress of this outward-smooth, inward- 
rough period, so difficult to describe, so 
real in experience. I had often won- 
dered whether I should go on living if 
mother should die, whether it would be 
possible to eat and drink, work and 
sleep, if she were gone. I thought 
about it because she was extremely 
frail, and steadily grew more saintly- 
spiritual and less equal to the burden of 
the work she wanted to do. I had, how- 
ever, endless faith that either the doc- 
tor would make her better, or that some 
change would come to make her strong 
again. It was a great comfort when the 
visiting ministers prayed for her — that 
the Lord would raise her up to strength. 
I felt sure it must be so. No other out- 
come was really thinkable; and I al- 
ways ended by believing that we were 
to live on together just as we always 



The Great Mystery. 135 

had. A boy's judgment is invariably 
colored by his wishes. 

But on one memorable day all my 
hopes were shattered. The stroke fell. 
I had to face the reality. I stood con- 
fronted with that most stubborn, inex- 
orable fact. It seemed impossible, and 
yet there it was. It ought not to be, 
and yet nothing could change it. I 
thought of all the cases I had ever read 
or heard of in which persons had been 
mistaken in calling some one dead. I 
clung like a drowning man to the vague 
hope that it might be a prolonged sleep, 
and that she would awaken and surprise 
us all. I strangely felt myself in the 
great company of sufferers all over the 
world, as though we belonged in one 
common fellowship. I saw a boy with 
whom I had often quarreled go by the 
house. I thought only of the bare fact 
that he had lost his mother, and so was 
in my group, and I burst into tears as I 
watched him. 



136 A Boy's Religion. 

Then followed my great rebellion — 
the worst I have ever known. Could a 
God be good who took away my 
mother ? Could there be any Heart of 
Love in a universe where such things 
happened ? I had never had the slight- 
est doubt of an immortal life after this 
one. I had taken it as though it were 
as much a settled fact as that the sun 
which went down in the west at night 
would come up in the east next morn- 
ing. ISTow I felt the ground going out 
from under this entire faith. My whole 
structure seemed toppling over. My 
prayers sounded hollow, and the kindly 
words of comfort spoken to me were 
empty words. It seemed at first as 
though this state of things would last 
forever. I saw no way out of it. I had 
come upon a mental condition as new as 
it was to the first man who ever faced 
death. Every rope in my ship was 
tested. The question was being settled, 
however little I knew it, whether I was 



The Great Mystery. 137 

to go to wreck or come through the 
storm with a stauncher faith than I had 
ever known before. 

The issue was determined, not by 
any one thing, not by any one sharply- 
defined experience, but rather by the 
trend of my entire previous life. My 
religion had been forming from baby- 
hood up. It was as much a part of me 
as the color of my eyes or my sense of 
space and time. I could not remember 
a time when I had not loved God and 
felt sure of His love. I had had my 
stages of development and of inward 
contest, but I had been perfectly sure 
of God all the time. Now my faith was 
suffering eclipse because I could not 
square this terrible event with my idea 
of a God of love. 

But little by little the memories of 
fifteen years came over this dark event 
with their trail of light. God had given 
me my mother, and through her I had 
learned of Him. There were hundreds 



138 A Boy's Religion. 

of bright points in our lives together 
when her love and patience had helped 
me rise to my consciousness of God. I 
could not forget how I had heard her in 
her prayers talk quietly with Him about 
me, as though she knew Him perfectly 
and wanted to make me acquainted 
with Him. I knew, too, that she fully 
expected to go on living with Him after 
death should come to her. It had ap- 
parently never occurred to her that 
death would do more than separate her 
from us. My trouble had largely come 
because I could not get my thoughts 
above the earth over her coffin. She 
seemed there to me, and if she was 
there, then God was not good. 

But as her faith in a new and larger 
life came over me and quickened my 
own, and as I settled back on all the 
sure evidences that all my life had been 
in the love of God, I began to realize 
that I had not lost my mother, that she 
was nearer to God than ever, and that 



The Great Mystery. 139 

I was more than ever bound to live her 
kind of life. But I came out of this 
struggle no longer a child. I had 
wrestled with an angel in the dark, and 
when I emerged with the blessing, I 
had passed a crisis. 

With this event came also the up- 
rooting of my life from its old environ- 
ment. I passed from the education 
which home and the free country life 
had to give to the more exact discipline 
and training of an old, well-established 
institution, which marked so completely 
the beginning of a new life that my 
boyhood story naturally ends here. I 
had never been beyond the horizon line 
which I could see from the hill-top in 
our field. Now I discovered a world as 
new to me as was the one which broke 
upon Columbus's sight as the Pinta 
touched San Salvador. But the events 
and experiences of this later period be- 
long too intimately to me to be told. 
One's childhood is so distant that as one 



140 A Boy's 'Religion. 

looks back on it, it seems in a sense to 
belong to somebody else, and its story 
can be told as if it were merely a narra- 
tive of a person whose life has come to 
an end. Even though the word " I " is 
used, it is the "I" that one remem- 
bers, rather than knows. 

Here I have given some backward 
glimpses upon my religious life as it 
slowly formed. It probably seems more 
somber than it really was. It has been 
necessary to touch the deeper moments 
to catch the crucial experiences. It 
may give the impression that I was not 
the ordinary, rollicking, healthy boy, 
but a child who lived apart and dwelt 
excessively on what was going on with- 
in. This would be a totally wrong im- 
pression and would spoil my story. I 
was never thought of by the neighbors 
as a " good boy." They saw in me the 
incarnation of the country boy — reck- 
less, stormy, fun-loving, a natural prod- 
uct of the lake and the woods, as free 



The Great Mystery. 141 

as a bird, and as devoid of conscience- 
pricks as an animal. " What will he 
make ? " was the frequent query. I 
have told my inner side because I be- 
lieve it is not extraordinary, but a some- 
what common experience. Boys are 
much deeper, much better, than even 
their mothers know, and down below 
what they show and what they say, is a 
center of life which never is wholly si- 
lent. If their friends knew how to 
reach it there would be more good men 
in the world than there are ! 



- 1902 






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